A Little Career Daydreaming

I was recently thinking about career and end goals (a perfect storm of a well timed email from KAC and a future-oriented conversation with DS), and I'm fairly confident that this video has been my guiding inspiration since I was three or four years old. Isn't it amazing? The video opened up my mind to a new way of storytelling and a new view of the world from the behind the scenes that has proved to be even more influential than I thought: I think it pushed me into documentary filmmaking.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have always had one eye on education and the other visual media. From my babysitting jobs, to selling educational games at a toy store, to taking up photography, to teaching Chinese. Somewhere along the way, I discovered documentaries; first I watched them, then I wanted to study them, and finally I wanted to be part of making them. One of my favorite things about filmmaking is the behind the scenes nature of it, both in documenting how something works and, on a meta level, in thinking about and being a part of how such a piece is constructed. I also love the educational aspect: wondering about something, and then figuring it out — the pursuit of knowledge. To me, documentary has both of these aspects: you're pursuing knowledge and you're making something in the process that will in turn open up those doors for other people. And the small scale at which one can do this is fascinating: crayons, gardens (my introduction to jazz, by the way), plumbing systems. It follows that I think the most impressionable audience for this is young children. What cool ways to explain reality to children! In short, want to make videos like these. How to do this is what I've been trying to figure out. I really liked working for the University of Chicago because of the way we were supporting education with video. My favorite projects were for the Oriental Institute and the Mansueto Library. But the scope there includes promotional as well as educational video, so not every project could be like those. I'm trying to move into more specifically educational video work in my recent job search, so at least the content will be in the right place. It would be really cool if I could get into the creative aspect of that work, though. What I would love to do is to make those Sesame Street videos and/or come up with a similar show. That's where coming up with children's show/vignette ideas with KAC comes in. Hopefully one day we'll have our own show, and we can make all the crayon videos we want.